Quite worrisome how the grass is looking. The english press has been saying they are painting the grass green (although there is no evidence of that... imho, the photos look like of a fungicide application backpack) So some people are saying that is evidence of the late World Cup preparations and... wait! Manaus grass had been planted in December 2013!!! Let´s look at evidence match in march And look here a test match at Arena Manaus played in April 2014 video from one month ago, before FIFA took charge... grass still looks good. all the evidence point out that grass begun to disintegrate ONLY AFTER the stadium passed to the command of FIFA who hired an EUROPEAN COMPANY (Royal Verd, from Catalonia, Spain, responsible for the Camp Nou turf) to take care of the stadiums. Royal Verd president himself said they did not expect Manaus weather to have so much rain, etc. It was ROYAL VERD and FIFA, Europeans without knowledge of Manaus weather, who clearly fumbled up in Manaus. anyway, based on this photo British media is saying they are painting the grass however, looks the same fungicide spraying machine being used in Beira Rio, where the stadium is quite perfect AND green
So apparently you don't need to wear a mask when using fungicide in Manaus. You can even have a couple of spectators.
If that guy is painting the grass green it's not working very well. Also I'd cover my nice loafers and trousers if I was going around spraying paint.
When the Cosmos painted some bare patches of the Randall's Island field green the day of Pele's first game there in 1975, so that it would look better for TV, it ended up looking worse rather than better. The painted spots were far darker than the real grass and looked hideous on TV. I'll bet that the Brazilians know better than to repeat that mistake. The guy spraying in Manaus looks just like the guys spraying stuff to kill dandelions in my neighborhood.
Whatever he's spraying must smell a lot better than the weed killer they use on 'decorative' gravel areas in my neighborhood. Stuff just about chokes you 2 days after they've finished. Someone should tell them that Eucalyptus oil works well as a fungicide, if that's what they need, and smells great......
Well, workers died building the stadium in Manaus, but not in Porto Alegre. Different safety standards?
Typical media bulllshite: ground is fine, it is not boiling hot and there has not been a invasion by mutant piranhas.
if he's painting the ground there then they took the picture just when he was starting, since the whole area in the picture looks patchy and there are no homogeneously green areas. Plus he'd have to have been starting in the middle of the pitch somewhere rather than starting at an edge and working his way back and forth.
and I have to see someone from Argentina posting this 10 months old photo at the Group D thread and every englishmen there believing the photo is current... the stadium still under construction and people bought it as being the current state of the stadium
Well, we saw the game, and as I expected, the grass is fine. No jaguars, crocodiles, or cannibals either, and the absence of mutant piranhas has been noticed. By all accounts, at the end of the game all 22 players, their subs and coaches had not been eaten. We hope they'll make it out of the Amazon still alive, with some luck. Huge swarms of overgrown mosquitoes loaded with yellow fever, malaria, and dengue were also nowhere to be seen. As another member of this fine message board said, it wasn't all smooth, because there was indeed at least one wild animal loose on the pitch - an overfed white capybara. He didn't score. His name is Rooney. He is not in the habit of scoring in World Cup games (11 of them, zero goals) even in colder climates, so, I wouldn't say it was the Manaus heat. Players didn't drop dead of dehydration or heat stroke. The English got booed, and shown panels saying "you're not welcome to the jungle". Well deserved.
From what we saw so far all the stadia were fine and the playing surfaces looked good. The matches so far showed a lot of quick passing on the ground from most teams which would be very difficult on bad grass.
We've heard so much about Manaus that i expected much worse....Pirlo 35 y o was the best player on the pitch means that technical and tactical skills are above anything...well except refereeing obviously
think exactly the same...since december people here keep telling us how europeans teams will struggle with brazilian conditions....i've been told also that black guys no matter where they live all year long cope better with heat than mediterraneans even when i kept telling that some of my best friends are blacks and as a mediterranean i cope better with heat than them, it just depands of individuals...England got more black than Italia, didn't they? Italia won... Cameroon can have a good game and beat Croatia but conditions won't be the reason.
Exactly. This has nothing to do with the continent you're from but with your fitness levels. Today's players are significantly fitter than in 1950 or in 1970 where European players looked like tourists with a sunburn and suffered a lot
No mutant piranhas? And no swimsuit model gorgeous Single Mom FBI agents with 5 master's degrees to combat them? Lame. I think a few loose alligators or mozzie swarms might have helped the English players run a li'l faster in the second half, which may have led to the 2-2 tie which should have been the result. Grass looked fine to me, much better than what you see in most American Football stadia after October.